Emily Brontë, who died, aged 30, in 1848, is a source of perennial fascination – and potentially a biographer’s nightmare. Her single novel, Wuthering Heights, has long been recognised as one of the greatest in the English canon, yet it remains a strange anomaly, seemingly unmoored from the wider history of Victorian fiction. Her haunting poems – of which there are 70-odd – can make you catch your breath. Meanwhile, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, the most inscrutable of the Brontë sisters seems to appear only to disappear.This is primarily – but perhaps not entirely – down to the prosaic fact that so few of her personal papers survive, which is not the case with most Victorian writers, including her older sister Charlotte. None of Emily’s letters are extant, save for two brief, unrevealing notes. The manuscript of Wuthering Heights has gone missing, as, more intriguingly, has that of her second novel, title and subject unknown.Also lost are the multi-volume prose narratives that she wrote in partnership with her younger sister Anne about ‘Gondal’, the imaginary kingdom they invented together as children and which went on to occupy their imaginations – especially Emily’s – into adulthood. Her surviving poetry is often written in the voices of Gondal characters, including a passionate, imperious queen who seems like a rehearsal for Cathy, though the full saga remains unclear. Without the Gondal prose, we can’t trace the development of the storytelling skill that created Wuthering Heights, which, as a result, seems to burst mysteriously upon the world fully formed.Julian Barnes once compared a biography to a net: a series of holes tied together with string. How to construct a convincing life out of scraps is a more pressing problem in Emily’s case than in most, especially given the quiet and insular external existence she appears to have led. She is not known to have made a single friend outside her family, and was resistant to going out into the world, preferring to stay at home in Haworth on the edge of her beloved Yorkshire moors.Over the past century, the lack of data has often invited wild biographical speculation, based on the unfounded assumption that the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff must have been inspired by some secret real-life love affair, though no clinching evidence has ever been found. (The 2022 biopic Emily has her engaging in ludicrously unlikely bodice-ripping sex with a local curate.). So it’s a relief that Deborah Lutz politely refuses to go any distance down that particular rabbit hole. She is well aware – as Emily’s serious biographers have always been – that the more interesting truth is to be found in the few but precious personal documents that do survive, and the glimpses they give us into her idiosyncratic mind.Emily’s four so-called ‘diary papers’ (two others were written jointly with Anne), produced over the years, demonstrate how at ease she was at living in two parallel worlds at once. Her fantasy life bleeds into the workaday reality of the laundrywoman when she records, as a teen, that ‘the Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back kitchin’. The slapdash spelling and lack of punctuation says much about her utter uninterest in conforming to convention.Meanwhile, a clutch of French compositions, written in her early twenties when she was studying in Brussels during a rare absence from Haworth, have long since offered critics an opening into what seems like a dark and uncompromising soul. One passage translates as: ‘Nature… exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live.’ Such proto-Darwinian nihilism sums up Emily’s refusenik rejection of Victorian moral sentimentality.Lutz is in a strong position to approach Emily, given that she has been thinking about the Brontës for a long time. Her 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet is an engaging study of physical objects associated with the family, including the brass collar once worn by Emily’s fearsome bulldog, Keeper. That feeling for material culture carries over into this new biography. It’s intriguing, for example, to be reminded that the very earliest surviving text from Emily’s hand is written not in ink but in thread: the sampler that she stitched when she was eight. The biblical verse it features – ‘Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?’ – uncannily presages Wuthering Heights with its cosmic forces. So, too, does the extreme neatness of the needlework. Emily’s novel may deal with uncontrollable emotions and wild weather but it is a masterpiece of literary control.Lutz is right to define her subject as a ‘consummate artist’ and ‘masterful writer’. It might be tempting to see Emily’s lifelong addiction to Gondal as mere arrested development. But it’s more meaningful to view it as symptomatic of a determination to cut out distraction: the place where she disciplined herself in the perfectionist demands of making what would turn out, in her best poems and in her novel, to be world-class, timeless art.The slapdash spelling in the ‘diary papers’ says much about Emily’s uninterest in conforming to conventionFew female writers of her era (perhaps of any) have been able to be so ruthless in protecting their creative space. Yet – unlike her sisters, who took governess jobs so that she could stay at home – Emily was not much interested in feminism as a social movement. She positively enjoyed unpaid housework because its repetitive – even meditative – bodily motions allowed her mind to roam free.Lutz traces how conflicting images of open and confined spaces flow through Emily’s known writings as the twin poles of her ‘world within’. Dungeons and graves fill her poetry, simultaneously attracting and horrifying her, as much as do the unbounded natural landscapes of the moors that she loved. By the time she was seven, she had seen her mother and two eldest sisters interred in the vault of the church opposite the family home. Heathcliff would later dig up Cathy’s corpse.By tracing such leitmotifs through Emily’s writings, Lutz creates a through-thread to connect the fragmentary sources. Elsewhere, she compensates for the absences by drawing more generally on the work of social historians to flesh out her subject’s material environment, informing us about, say, Victorian sanitary towels, the smell of tallow candles, or how cold it was in an early railway carriage.But it’s her interest in Emily’s manuscripts as physical entities that shines out, inspiring her to reconstruct her subject’s working practices. She has the alertness of a true bibliophile when it comes to the quirks of the original paper and ink of Emily’s poetry manuscripts. Lutz draws on the work of the late great Brontë scholar Tom Winnifrith to explain the probable process of Wuthering Heights’s composition. Such textually informed speculation is of a wholly different order to the cautionary tale offered by the biographer who once misread the title of a Gondal poem – in fact ‘Love’s Farewell’ – as ‘Louis Parensell’, and identified the said imaginary Louis as Emily’s lost lover.Occasionally, Lutz indulges in poetic licence, as when she applies the phrase used of the fictional Cathy – ‘a wild, wick slip’ – to Emily herself; or when she tells us that Emily ‘certainly’ role-played Cathy up on the moors. She also wants it both ways when it comes to the controversy – which got Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, into trouble in 1857 – as to just how bad the boarding school fictionalised in Jane Eyre really was. We’re told that the pupils’ meals were nutritious compared to many of their contemporaries’, but also that the Brontës’ eldest sister Maria died from an infection contracted as a result of the ‘poor nutrition’ provided at the school.Those very minor cavils aside, it says much for Lutz’s skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.
Ted Hughes memorably labeled Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë the “three weird sisters,” and Emily has typically been seen as the weirdest of the three. Gauche, aloof, and dowdy, she channeled her energies into creating intense, brooding poetry and a famously sui generis novel, Wuthering Heights, seething with storms and otherworldly passion.The loss of almost all of Emily’s papers — thousands of pages of prose and poetry and all but three of her letters — no doubt partially explains the customary view of her as elusive and mysterious. In This Dark Night, Deborah Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Penn State, has attempted to reconstruct Emily’s life using a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including weather reports, the diaries of Emily’s neighbors, and local newspapers, as well as Brontë manuscripts that had been missing for over 100 years.The result is a judicious and accessible biography that interweaves Emily’s quotidian routines and trials in a parsonage on the edge of bleak Yorkshire moorland with an imaginative and creative life that would culminate in the dark drama of Heathcliff and Cathy. [...]Patrick was a curate who hailed from a poor Irish family. His father’s surname was Ó Pronntaigh — anglicized, it would be Prunty, Brunty, Branty, or perhaps Bruntee. Patrick alternately spelled his surname Brontè, Bronté, Brontê, and Brontē. As Lutz says, playing with names was a family obsession. Emily, who was the only one of the Brontë sisters with a middle name, saw herself as Emily Jane as a reminder of the many Janes on her mother’s side.The family had moved to Haworth from Thornton in 1820, and Emily would live there nearly all her life. She had only around a year of formal schooling. Patrick taught her at home, and she read avidly — everything from Aesop’s Fables and Virgil to Walter Scott, Dickens, and probably French novels that, as Lutz says, were thought to be “perverse, ‘unspeakably foul,’ and even dangerous.” Roaming the windswept moors, reading, and writing were her treasured means of escape from household chores.The young siblings began to write stories after Patrick gave Branwell a box of 12 wooden soldiers. The soldiers inspired the imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria. At the age of 12 or 13, Emily began to create the fantasyland of Gondal with her sister Anne, who was her best friend. Gondal would become an enduring obsession.Emily spent three months at Roe Head School in Mirfield, around 20 miles from Haworth, when she was 17. Lutz confirms that Emily didn’t thrive in exile. Forced to follow a strict routine for 12 hours a day, she felt penned in, and she didn’t make friends easily. She eventually fell ill and left for home. According to Charlotte, “Emily loved the moors...Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.”In 1838-39, Emily spent a short spell as an instructor at a girls’ school; in 1842, she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels to study at a boarding school. A student in Brussels who would become Charlotte’s lifelong friend said of Emily, “I simply disliked her from the first, her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure contrasting so strongly with Charlotte’s small, neat, trim person.” On learning of the death of her aunt Elizabeth, Emily returned to Haworth with Charlotte. A later plan by the sisters to open a school at the parsonage failed to get off the ground.Charlotte, Emily, and Anne would go on to publish a volume of poems at their own expense using the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold in the space of a year. Undaunted, Charlotte announced to the sisters’ publisher that they were preparing three novels for publication: The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.Emily took around two years to finish Wuthering Heights — the only novel she left us — which was rejected at least four times before it found a publisher. She had to pay to have it published and, as Lutz confirms, the reviews were on the whole unfavorable. It was thought coarse, strange, savage, and eccentric. Emily would die in the year after it was published.The gaps in our knowledge of Emily’s life have fueled much speculation. Brontë scholars have been intrigued by the question of whether, in her 16th year, she had a romantic entanglement that led her father to suddenly decide to send her away to school. Conclusions have been drawn from her androgyny and boldness — a local described her as being “more like a man than a woman, and very dominant in will” — and from the male nickname (“The Major”) that she was given.Such questions are left open here. Lutz resists making judgments on whether Emily was autistic, dyslexic, asexual, queer, transgender, anti-racist, a feminist, or an environmentalist on the basis that “these twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas and identities don’t import easily into the past.”Notwithstanding Charlotte’s verdict that Emily “had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life,” This Dark Night evidences her domesticity and anchors the account firmly in the everyday. Emily’s hours were filled with running the house — by sewing, baking, and cleaning — and she looked after the sisters’ finances, including their shares in the York and North Midland Railway Company. Her piano playing — she played with “precision and brilliancy” — and her love of animals provided release.Emily also learned how to shoot from her father, who, following an attack on a cloth mill by around 100 Luddites, had the habit of keeping a gun by him and discharging it out of the window each morning. She was unfashionable and extremely reserved, and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She was, as Charlotte suggested, “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.”Emily’s world is hauntingly rendered in This Dark Night. Wuthering weather (“wuthering” means characterized by strong winds) never left Haworth and the moors for long, and the average age of death in the area was 19 by some measures. The local church accommodated two or three funerals a week, so the sight of mourners and of graves being dug would have been familiar to the Brontë siblings. In the autumn, following the ancient English tradition of the bone fire (Lutz points to the likely origin of the word “bonfire” in the term), old bones that had been removed from graves to make way for the newly dead were burned. Small wonder Emily was much possessed by death and inclement weather. (Stuart Kay)
The Hay Festival has launched 'The Pleasure List', a crowd-sourced collection of 39 captivating books chosen by the public to revive the joy of reading across Britain. [...]The campaign has been developed in partnership with the National Year of Reading 2026, serving as a direct response to worrying statistics that suggest fewer and fewer people across the United Kingdom are choosing to read for pleasure in their spare time. (Aimée Walsh)
The film premiered last week Cannes, where early reactions praised its pitch-black humor and savage tone, comparing the movie to a collision between Jane Eyre and American Psycho. (Brad Miska)
'Wuthering Heights' by Emily BrontëMost people have heard of, if not read, Brontë's romantic and rather disturbing novel, first released in 1847 under a pseudonym. Some readers at the time found the tale immoral and its romantic lead, Heathcliff, too wild and cruel. An edited version, released in 1850, garnered more interest, and the harrowing, compelling novel is now considered a masterpiece.The recent Warner Bros. Pictures adaptation has drawn considerable attention. Many loyal Brontë fans were critical of the film, which turned a tale of obsessive love, abuse and revenge into something more palatable and glossy for theatergoers. Despite this, the movie was a huge box-office hit, with some speculating on its potential for an Oscar or two come 2027. (Gillian Harvey)
What’s more, through my reading I began to see that the Gothic is not only the terrain of personal terrors. Historical atrocities live there, too. Even in nineteenth century British classics, the Gothic is used to express the racism, sexism and colonialism we’d rather not see, the painful history—and present—we’d like to keep locked in the attic. Jane Eyre’s Rochester, who makes a fortune from the enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations, has a mad first wife in the attic—a symbol not only of his troubled romantic past, but the corruption and violence at the root of his fortune. [...]Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, her feminist, post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre, after nine years of labor and 27 years of literary silence. It tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young white Creole woman in Dominica whose family is pushed into poverty after the end of slavery. Her opportunistic marriage to Mr. Rochester, meant to save her family from destitution, brings misery to all. He disdains her Creole identity; she mocks how poorly he understands the people and land around him. Rhys’s prose is lush, dark, and gorgeous. By giving literature’s famed “madwoman in the attic” a (new) name and a voice, Rhys showed that behind every fearsome Gothic monster is a wounded child bearing the mark of difference. Wide Sargasso Sea takes the subtle colonial critique of Jane Eyre and makes it explicit.
Oh, and yes, much to Sarah's relief, we made it to the Brontë Parsonage before they closed the door for the day. While Sarah was poring over one of the very desk boxes that the sisters wrote their manuscripts on, I struck up a conversation with a guide, who, after I explained why we arrived so late, told me about a 'classic mounting block' at nearby Ponden Hall."The hall is an historic 17th-century manor heavily associated with the Brontë family and often considered the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights," she divulged."It's got five steps on either side, leading to a small platform atop, you'd absolutely love it," she said.No prizes for guessing where I took Sarah bright and early the next day. (Tim the Yowie Man)
Sat 23 May, 2:00pmBrontë Event Space in the Old School RoomA special opportunity to create your own flowers from human hair using traditional and self-devised techniques of braiding, spinning, weaving, sewing and knotting. These gestures draw on Victorian mourning hairwork and other marginalised craft traditions long dismissed as ornamental or sentimental. Participants will create small hairwork flowers, which can be mounted as pendants or keepsakes. Synthetic hair will be available as an alternative to natural hair.During the Victorian era hair was often weaved into jewellery for remembrance. We welcome back conceptual artist and historian Donna Lowson who will be leading this workshop guiding us through the history of Victorian hairwork.Donna Lowson is an artist, collector, and former hairdresser whose practice centres on working with human hair to uncover the stories embedded within it. Drawing on Georgian and Victorian hairwork, the 19th-century practice of creating jewellery and keepsakes from human hair, she uses making as a research method to uncover marginalised craft traditions and bring them into contemporary practice. Donna has collaborated with Bankfield Museum, contributing demonstrations and workshops as part of “In Loving Memory,” and ongoing museum collection study visits and hands-on historical research inform her work. She leads workshops that invite participants to experience the cultural, material, and historical significance of hair firsthand.
She also viewed the university’s collection of material associated with Yorkshire’s most famous literary family, the Brontës, whose father, Patrick Prunty (who changed his surname to avoid the connotation with Ireland), was originally from Co Down.“We’re claiming them back,” the President joked in reference to the Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne.Paper was scarce in 18th-century England and Connolly viewed a mock newspaper written up by Charlotte Brontë in tiny handwriting on an Epsom salts wrapper when she was just 13. Charlotte read the newspaper to the family collection of toy soldiers. (Ronan McGreevy)
She also mentioned Patrick Brontë, the County Down father of the Brontë sisters. (Charles Gray)
4. This Dark Night: The Life Of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Continuum, priced £20 (ebook £14). Available May 28Drawing on newly unearthed material, Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night is a lively, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched biography of Gothic fiction titan Emily Brontë. Rooted in the dramatic landscape of the Yorkshire moors, Lutz paints a vivid portrait of the surroundings, people and politics that gave rise to Wuthering Heights. Readers hoping for a biography with an exclusive focus on the middle Brontë sister will not find it here, however. So entwined was her life with those of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, that any attempt to separate Emily entirely would be misrepresentative. It is Lutz’s dissection of Bronte’s works, from early writings set in the fictional Gondal, to her now renowned 1847 novel, that place her at the biography’s centre. Despite a somewhat slow start, This Dark Night, underpinned by wide-ranging sources and expert analysis, is a discerning insight into the woman behind a tale which has captivated generations. (Prudence Wade)
The much-awaited biographical book This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life by Deborah Lutz has hit the shelves.Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, it constructs a portrait of the gothic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights’ author, who is considered to be an elusive figure with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death.It tackles her relationship with her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and how grieving their mother impacted her writing.The author also illustrates how Emily, who lived from 1818 to 1848, discussed debates of her time such as class and race, which author Deborah believes still resonate today.She recounted experiencing grief during the writing process.“While I was writing the passages about the death of the Brontës’ mother, my mother died,” she said on social media.“She had been ill and frail for a very long time, so her death was no surprise. But then, exactly a month after her death, my dear, dear dog Penny suddenly died. That loss was devastating, especially on top of my mother’s death,” she added.“When I got back to writing, I had the occasion to ponder the ways that death and grieving became an integral part of Emily Brontë’s work and life.”The 19th-century English-American literature professor is known for her classic works, including The Brontë Cabinet (2015), which brought alive the fascinating lives of the Brontë sisters through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on and inscribed.It was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and has been translated into Spanish and Japanese. (Rima Al Haddad)
Wuthering Heights was always meant to be controversial. Whether literature fans wanted another adaptation or not, Emerald Fennell’s version was more Gone With the Wind than Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, when the film hit screens for Valentine’s Day 2026, something was missing. The Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie team-up was marketed as one of the steamiest and most erotic romances of the decade.Save for some erotic asphyxiation in the first scene, Wuthering Heights felt extremely performative and did not deliver on the promise of a subversive bodice ripper. Whether the movie was a decent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s book was beside the point. Wuthering Heights failed in its edginess because another film had already stolen its thunder. That honor went surprisingly to Saltburn, Fennell’s second feature, also starring Elordi. [...]Wuthering Heights wasn’t brave enough to make these characters' motivations work and make them truly reprehensible, as opposed to just catty. The film was never going to be a proper adaptation of the Gothic book, but it at least could have been daring. Instead, it was toothless and utterly unsexy, refusing to take any big risks. Love it or hate it, Saltburn at the very least swung for the fences. (Carolyn Jenkins)
Fortunately you don’t have to admire Jacob Elordi’s stab at Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to be knocked out by On Swift Horses which is a remarkably good film now available on Binge. [...]It’s fascinating – needless to say – what people are saying about the rise of Jacob Elordi. It was no less a figure than Pedro Almodovar who asked whether Jacob Elordi was ‘just a sex symbol or a respected actor’.This was in the context of the great director saying Wuthering Heights was ‘very bad’ and that it was not the fault of Margot Robbie or Jacob Elordi – ‘They do what they can,’ he said. The great Spanish director of Volver added that Frankenstein’s monster was a very convenient role for an actor. (Peter Craven)
The Phoenix Picturehouse and the Ultimate Picture Palace have become two of my regular Oxford haunts. I have seen Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Sirāt, The Secret Agent, and Project Hail Mary, among others.It’s no surprise that I am constantly distracted by soundtracks: the drolly bittersweet placement of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, Charli XCX’s gothic and brooding backdrop to the moors of “Wuthering Heights”, stomach-dropping grief carried by Sirāt’s industrial techno score, and Jeremy Allen White’s sincere recreations of the folk-rock I grew up with. I usually leave the cinema buzzing. Maybe I’m easily impressed, or maybe it has been a great year for music in the media. (Julia Blackmon)
My very favorite book is Jane Eyre, and there’s a part where Mr. Rochester is talking to Jane, and he’s comparing her to a bird in a cage, and he is like, I could crush this cage, but I’d never get at the bird inside. And I mentioned this quote in my first book, when I talked about what actually happened to me when I was kidnapped. My captors could hurt my body, but my body always protected my spirit. I felt that way through my whole life; my body has carried me through every worst day. It’s given me my children. My body has been through a lot, but it has never let anyone crush my spirit. If it stopped protecting me, then I’d be dead. But here I am alive. So now I feel bodybuilding, for me, is honoring my body. Like, taking the time and the care and the attention that it’s deserved all along, because now it’s stronger. I’m healthier, I’m fitter. (Stephanie Radvan and Andrea Simpson)
Speaker Alexander Clifford, a historian and editor of a new edition of Snowden’s autobiography, says: "With typical Yorkshire grit, Snowden overcame grinding rural poverty and paralysing disability to become the Labour Party’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer."But one decision would change his life totally, turning him from socialist hero to traitor and villain and resulting in his expulsion from the party."Snowden embraced his new role with gusto, dedicating the rest of his life to attacking the party and people he had once loved."His bitter, self-destructive quest for vengeance has strange parallels to a more famous fictional moorland outsider."My talk will explore the fascinating story of how and why Philip Snowden betrayed his party to ruthlessly pursue a political vendetta. Was he Labour’s Heathcliff?" (Alistair Shand)
Book to Screen: The new Wuthering HeightsFriday 22 May 2026, 5.30pm – Global StageEmerald Fennell is an Oscar-winning writer and a director known for work that sparks conversation and looks controversy straight in the face. Here she discusses her latest film, a big screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.Fennell first read the book at the age of 14, and says it quite simply “cracked me open”. As we’ve come to expect from the woman behind the controversial Saltburn, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is provocative, sexy and primal. She's in conversation with the comedian and presenter, Tom Allen.
Wuthering HeightsEmily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" book was first published in 1847, yet it was still making waves nearly 180 years later by way of a new film adaptation from writer and director Emerald Fennell. Much of that conversation stemmed from discourse over the casting of Heathcliff, who was played by Jacob Elordi (previously the star of Fennell's 2023 feature "Saltburn"). The decidedly Caucasian Australian was not who many people had in mind for the role, considering Heathcliff is described in the text as "dark-skinned" and receives many racially motivated insults that heavily suggest he's a person of color.To boot, Heathcliff being non-white factors heavily into the larger themes (namely class) that defines Brontë's seminal text. These elements all played a role in Heathcliff's whitewashing dominating the pre-release conversation cycle for "Wuthering Heights." Once the film was finally released, further controversy erupted over the drastic liberties Fennell had taken in adapting this project for the big screen.Even the casting of Hong Chau and Shazad Latif in key supporting roles (albeit ones that didn't really comment on or thoughtfully use their racial identities) lent new critical angles to the previous whitewashing controversy. "Wuthering Heights" was a movie plagued by tremendous discourse, though that didn't stop it from grossing $241.6 million worldwide. (Lisa Laman)
6. HathersageHathersage has strong literary connections - having inspired Charlotte Brontë while she was writing Jane Eyre [not exactly]. The nearby North Lees Hall (pictured here) also became the main inspiration for Thornfield Hall. (Tom Hardwick)
Hannah MarkleyStudies in the Novel, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2026, pp. 121-137This essay explores how debilitated appetites in Wuthering Heights spread among the novel’s characters as diseases. While critics comment on the ways Heathcliff’s hunger engenders Catherine’s anorectic refusals, Hindley’s alcoholism and Frances’s tubercular consumption also respond to Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, exposing more complex entanglements of physical illness, emotional suffering, and traumatic experience. By situating these appetites in relation to nineteenth-century medical ideas about Anorexia nervosa, inebriety, tuberculosis, and miasma theories of disease, the disabling effects of racial persecution (Heathcliff), gendered confinement (Catherine and Frances), and social dispossession (Hindley) disclose biopolitical distributions of risk along the lines of race, gender, class, and disability that underwrote British racial capitalism, structuring both appetite and embodiment in the provincial scene of the everyday.
Double Fringe First winners Theatre Caddis are set to bring their comedy, Jane Eyre Convention to Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a run in London earlier this Summer.The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Brontë-aficinados [sic] gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic.In this fast-paced farce, the enthusiasts feel that they gain new insights and a better understanding of the story of Jane Eyre, and potentially one another. The show promises audiences a funny, uplifting and quirky jaunt - with unrealistic violence, bonnets, and minimal raunch! The show has enjoyed sell-out runs at Lambeth Fringe, and recent shows at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London.The show may also appeal to Brontë fans who enjoyed the recent hype around Emerald Fennel's [sic] adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Theatre Caddis is a London-based theatre company known for staging new, eclectic work, showcasing performances that blend humor, literary homage, and character studies.Jane Eyre Convention is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 6th - 28th (not 10th and 18th) August at 12.25pm (60 mins), Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House venue number 288). (Stephi Wild)
Perhaps no artifact captures the intimacy of Victorian hair work quite like a small bracelet housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Composed of six light brown braids belonging to each of the three sisters – Emily, Charlotte, and Anne – it remains one of the most talked-about pieces of hairwork in existence. The bracelet is technically unwearable now; the clasps are open and one of the braids has come loose. Its power lies not in its intricacy, as the braids themselves are simple up close, but in the identity of its owners. The fact that the Brontë sisters belonged to a lower-middle class family only reinforces how universal the practice was.This very bracelet recently found its way back into popular culture. When Margot Robbie attended a London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, she wore a dress adorned with light brown braids inspired by the Brontë piece. Robbie even accessorized her look with a replica of the bracelet itself – a gesture that bridged Victorian sentimentality and contemporary red-carpet fashion in one deliberate styling choice.Hair charms also appear in the literature the Brontës produced. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff removes a lock of Edgar Linton’s hair from Cathy Earnshaw’s corpse’s locket and replaces it with his own, sending a piece of himself and their love off with her spirit. The plan unravels when Nelly, the housemaid and narrator of the novel, entwines Linton’s hair with Heathcliff’s. Scholar Deborah Lutz described this act as opening up the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy between the two men. Though it is the only Brontë novel to directly reference mourning jewelry, the scene underscores how central hair work was to Victorian emotional life.
On this episode of “Read All About It!,” the four hosts give our long-awaited review of the film “Wuthering Heights.”Hosts discuss whether the film is a true adaptation, as many characters were omitted entirely from the movie. (Vanessa Hanna)
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Emily BrontëTranslation by Nicole d'Amonville AlegríaForeword by Cristian OlivéEditorial MolinoISBN: 978-8427254589February 2026En los páramos desolados de Yorkshire, el amor y la venganza se entrelazan en una historia tan salvaje como el viento que azota la mansión de Cumbres Borrascosas. Heathcliff, un huérfano marcado por la humillación y el desprecio, consagra su vida a un amor imposible por Catherine Earnshaw, una obsesión que lo consume hasta la destrucción. Emily Brontë creó una de las novelas más intensas e incomprendidas de la literatura, desafiando las normas sociales de la época y dejando a su paso un reguero de censura y escándalos.
Charlotte Brontë was famously “plain” – and possibly also vain. She cared very much about clothes, and there are many insights to be gained from paying close attention to what is left of her wardrobe. In this unusual biography, a nine-year labour of love, Eleanor Houghton even includes a bar chart tracking the many references to clothes in Brontë’s letters. The author, a Brontë scholar, fashion historian, couture milliner and costume consultant on period dramas, would go so far as to call Brontë’s clothes the only surviving “witnesses” to her subject’s life. The “testimonies” in Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes derive from chemically analysing fabrics, painstakingly establishing provenance and poring over everything from Brontë’s intricately stitched baby bonnet to the knitted baby socks given to her for the baby she was carrying when she died.At the age of sixteen, Brontë drew a picture of a woman wearing the kind of frock she probably yearned for, with dropped shoulders, puff sleeves and a high waist. Two years later, in 1834, her brother painted her, in the “pillar portrait”, more soberly attired in a dress matching those of her sisters: dark and sombre, with a high neckline, a large modest collar and sleeves that might seem voluminous in 2026, but, Houghton writes, “lack the exuberance (and internal scaffolding) of their peers”. This painting has “disproportionately shaped our views of … [her] appearance and clothing … This drably dressed Charlotte has haunted us through the years”.The real Brontë did eventually manage to indulge her sense of style, and this book shows her, quite literally, fashioning herself. Houghton notes, for example, how Brontë made a dress for her first job as a governess that fastened at the front, so she could dress without help, in privacy, and inserted large hidden pockets so that she could keep her secrets from her prying employers. In a tour de force exegesis of a “greying corset”, Houghton conjures up Brontë in Brussels, in love with her married French teacher, slipping away to buy a “punitive” corset, which gave her such a narrow waist that, much later, George Smith, her editor, would worry that tight lacing had shortened her life.
Muckle, Lacey Nicole; Siegel, Jonah (chair); McGill, Meredith (member); Luciano, Dana (member); Grossman, Jonathan (member);Rutgers University ; School of Graduate Studies, 2026This project focuses on how the ideological and stylistic strategies that Frederick Douglass used in his first autobiography influenced Charlotte Brontë’s immensely popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Subsequently, Jane Eyre’s widespread influence created a subsection of mid-nineteenth-century reform novels that contain “the rebellious aesthetic,” a narrative style in which authors imported the aesthetic aspects of rebellion from Douglass by-way-of Brontë without considering how different representational strategies might be necessary for different political projects. The first part of this project explains Douglass’s influence on Brontë, and how Brontë’s novel subsequently reproduces the aesthetics of (rather than actually imagines or incites) rebellion. The rest of this project tracks how Douglass’s rhetorical strategies were refracted through Jane Eyre into a set of novels written between the aftermath and enactment of the British Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and the end of the American Civil War (1865). Techniques created by authors of slave narratives came to shape the way white authors represented different political projects. Ultimately, when these authors attempted to portray other social issues using the style of Douglass’s narrative (mediated through Brontë’s novel), the rebellious aesthetic limited how they could imagine or portray different forms of social transformation.
TheWrap: When you started on the project, what were the things that you and Emerald talked about in terms of the look of “Wuthering Heights?”Linus Sandgren: It started with her, obviously, talking about the film in regards to her vision. I hadn’t read the book, I read her script, and she’s really great at actually explaining with few words, so you get images in your head when she’s talking … you sort of see images when she explains things. With “Saltburn,” she would explain how he’s licking the bathtub, you get images in your head.What was lovely was that the core of the story, the core of the visual storytelling comes from how she saw it as she read the book for the first time, basically, and therefore it was a mishmash of inspirational images that could be coming from Brutalist architecture that she’s seen in her neighborhood with films she’s seen as a kid or other things. She built that story in her head and the dream for her was to make a film that looked like that.She wanted to shoot it all on stage. Basically, to be able to create, at least the world, to look in a specific way and not just shoot in a random house. Everything is derived from her fantasy that has evolved, I’m sure, over the years, and so she had very specific ideas for costume and the design. It would be like the element of a rock and she would have images of rocks, and then images of unclear details of an animal on the wall that you don’t know what it is, but it looks gross, but it’s also beautiful, and it’s actually nothing special. It’s just a piece between the leg and the chest on a pig, but it looks like something else.It was [a] playful and very inspirational room that she had, with inspiring images that were not necessarily in the movie but they were helping us feel the freedom to go much further than you would normally do in in a film that would have to stick to reality – in a way that it was meant to be heightened realism and focus on the love story itself and let the world be expressive for this strong love story, in the same way romantic painters painted dramatic landscapes of man and nature. I think we use the same idea in different ways. Nature and man could be combined in, as much as we could fit, everything to whatever goes on emotionally. And then we had the freedom to be more dramatic than normal, Emerald encouraged [it].From shot to shot, as we went through the story, we decided on what would benefit this scene emotionally to make us feel when we watch these images and the actors in them, how they feel like inside, you always want to do that, but I think to a degree, in this case, it was only what we cared about. That was fun, because that was different from other films, and also, it was a dramatic, emotional and sensual story, which also was different for me.Emerald is the most fun to work with, because it’s always laughter. We always have so fun. Doing this film after “Saltburn” was really a fun challenge, but more challenging for all of us was the technical stuff, because it demanded more technical solutions for everything to work.What were those technical challenges?Well, for example, you decide to shoot on stage and build a house on stage with the interior and the exterior of the house. We shot only landscape shots and the introduction and the hanging and different things on location, but otherwise anytime you were outside around the Wuthering Heights house or Thrushcross Grange, it was on stage.One, you need a variation of weather to both entertain the audience, but also, we saw that as an opportunity to use the weather for the different emotions. That was an important key. It’s like when you play Zelda, then you mix these superpower drinks, you put down like a little bit of Kubrick here and then a little bit of “Gone With the Wind” here and German Expressionism there.I always try to think, which painterly style are we in? “Saltburn” was more baroque, because it could be like a picture that depicts something really hard to watch, but at the same time, you can’t resist watching it because it looks great. In this case, it was like, go all in on romanticism, use the nature with the emotions of the characters and an absolute classic.Also, because we were on stage, that it couldn’t look too artificial. The lighting, in a way, I feel like it should look naturalistic as much as possible, like the correct color temperatures that is in the real world, but an unrealistic amount of dramatic lighting, because it was always somewhat dramatic – either it was foggy or it was like rainy or it was the last sun with the dramatic clouds. Because it happened to be always a little bit dramatic, I guess that is what creates that heightened reality or surrealism in combination with strange sets.When we’re on location, we wanted to maintain that look on location and the technical challenges there would become that it’s sunny and windy, and you want to have a foggy looking or rainy looking scene, we added fog and added rain. All those scenes that look foggy or rainy were a challenge. There was also a challenge to light it in such a way that you had a great flexibility, because we shot on, I forgot now how many days, but it must have been over 40 days on the stages. And, from one day to another, you change, or even from one shot to another, you change direction, and a lot of lights are up there in the ceiling and on pipes and stuff. We needed to always have the flexibility to turn around. And so, we had to add more lights than we needed in a way that I basically peppered the ceiling with the LED lights.It was technical challenges like this because we aimed for creating somewhat realistic but also a dramatic once-a-month type of moment for every shot or every scene. Why it becomes a little more surreal but it was really about trying to capture whatever felt important in that particular scene, emotionally, in the most appropriate way, to enhance that with the visuals, which you don’t always do in films, because sometimes you want it to not be looking the way it feels or you want to do it in more subtle ways or realistic ways. Here it was more all in, which was different and fun. (Drew Taylor)
Fans of period dramas – particularly those inspired by novels from the Brontë sisters – are in for an absolute treat, as one largely overlooked television gem is being celebrated as essential viewing. Having accumulated rave reviews and widespread critical acclaim in the years following its release, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall made its debut on the BBC in November 1996.The three-part miniseries is adapted from Anne Brontë's 1848 novel of the same name and was directed by Mike Barker. Available to watch for free on BBC iPlayer, this outstanding period drama has prompted viewers to declare it surpasses even adaptations of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. (Parul Sharma)
Tianming BaiJournal of Victorian Culture, vcag006, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcag006This essay explores the largely under-read Brontë Parsonage garden. The garden was used as a signifier of the supposed Brontë ‘gloom’ by Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two inaugurators of the Brontë myth. By paying attention to how the garden was described in their travelogues, I examine the ways in which later pilgrims to the Brontë shrine in Haworth helped consolidate its reputation for bleakness. The Brontë garden featured in their recollections as a liminal space between English domesticity and Yorkshire wilderness, between femininity and creativity, and between life and death. One myth I want to disentangle is the popular image of Charlotte as the angel who laboured dutifully in the Parsonage garden. It may have been Emily Brontë who cared about gardening. I then argue that the Parsonage garden and the Yorkshire moors are places where later occupants and pilgrims can negotiate their affiliations with the literary family, the region, and a version of the nation the Brontës came to embody. Whereas the Haworth moorland embodies a regionalist perception of Northern Englishness as wild and barren, in the afterlife of the Brontës, the garden usually attests to a notion of Englishness as cultivated, delicate, and disciplined. The various transformations the Parsonage garden underwent in the half-century since the 1860s, the various responses to such changes, as well as recent creative refashioning of the image of the ‘Brontës in the garden’, all speak to the transformation of the Brontë myth and the ever-changing affiliations of locals, visitors, and the public with Brontë heritage.
“She should have been a man — a great navigator,” was the opinion of one of her teachers. “She was in the strictest sense a law onto herself,” a childhood friend remarked, with a hint of archness. “I have never seen her parallel in anything,” her sister Charlotte said, sounding half-admiring, half-exasperated.Among a family of weird, wild talents, Emily Brontë was the weirdest and wildest. Brought up in the semi-seclusion of a remote north Yorkshire parsonage, all the Brontës — Maria and Elizabeth, who died in childhood, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who lived long enough to write books, plus poor, spoilt, opium-addled brother Branwell — were shy, but it was Emily, the “tall, long-armed girl” with “liquid… dark blue” eyes whom visitors singled out as particularly reserved or rude.It was Emily who loved the moors so intensely that being away from her Haworth home seemed to make her physically ill and it was Emily whose first “electric” novel (as another Emily — Dickinson — described it) was a love story so painfully strange and addictive that, 179 years later, it’s still making bank for Hollywood. This year, thanks to a bump from Emerald Fennell’s wickedly provocative film, Wuthering Heights has sold 123,265 copies in the UK. In a world where no one reads any more, nearly 1,000 people a day are still buying Emily’s book.Elusive Emily is also the Brontë sister who left the fewest traces — almost all of her letters and thousands of pages of her prose and poetry are missing, probably destroyed. This might explain why This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, is “the first comprehensive biography” of Emily in more than two decades, as its publisher rather grandly proclaims.The Brontës weren’t really native Yorkshire, but the children of transplants. Their spectacularly driven father, Patrick, born in a two-room cottage in Co Down, got himself to the University of Cambridge, published a book of poetry and later displayed an unusual if patchy interest in educating his daughters. Their mother, Maria, also a writer, came from a well-to-do family in Penzance and married down with Patrick, something Cathy, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, refuses to do despite being madly in love with Heathcliff. Was this perhaps a sign of Emily heeding her mother’s cautionary tale? After having six children in quick succession, Maria died from cancer in 1821 when Emily was three, in “more agonising pain than I ever saw anyone endure”, according to her husband.Death and trauma hang over Emily’s early years: aged six, she joined her sisters at Cowan Bridge — the school whose tough regimen would inspire nightmarish Lowood in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre — where snow soaked into the pupils’ shoes as they walked to church, condemning them to chilblains. “Much worse happened in schools of the time,” Lutz says bracingly, which I’m sure is true, but perhaps wouldn’t have been much consolation to Emily when her two oldest sisters developed consumption and died, aged eleven and ten.Such experiences shaped her gothic imagination: mother and daughters were buried in the family vault beneath the stone floor of Haworth church (a privilege accorded the parson), so that three times as a very young child, Emily saw a crypt open and her loved ones disappear inside it. Tombs haunt her work, as Lutz points out. Twice in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff digs up his beloved Cathy’s grave.After this almost unimaginably grim start, Emily’s childhood improved. Their father took the girls out of school — to lose two daughters may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose any more would have looked like carelessness — and their mother’s sister arrived from Cornwall to look after them. In a Brontë novel she would have been a wicked stepmother figure, like Jane Eyre’s Mrs Reed, but Aunt Branwell, though strict, was adored by the children. After lessons from their father — Emily showed an unladylike aptitude for geometry and geography and later, rather delightfully, managed the family’s railway investments — their aunt would read aloud to them from newspapers and Walter Scott histories as they sat sewing by the fire.Of the three surviving sisters, it was Emily who had the pleasantest life. Charlotte and Anne both endured long, unhappy stints away from home as schoolteachers and governesses (the “asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs”, Charlotte complained of her pupils. She was perhaps not temperamentally suited to moulding young minds) whereas Emily, after a brief teaching stint aged 20, was mostly allowed to remain at home.Why the special treatment? The family seemed to consider her too headstrong for regular employment (“This is slavery I fear she will never stand,” Charlotte said). She certainly sounds like a fearsome creature, striding round the countryside with her dogs Grasper and Keeper, whom she sketched with great tenderness and beat when they misbehaved, bringing home wild geese and feral cats.She ran the household, gardening, ironing and baking, always with a pencil at her side. She was first and foremost a poet: by the age of 22 she had written about 72 poems, mostly on tiny scraps of paper she kept in her copious detachable pockets. Many of the preoccupations of Wuthering Heights appear in them, particularly her love affair with the moors by moonlight: “It seems strange that aught can lie/ Beyond its zone of silver sky.”The summer of 1845, when all three sisters reunited at Haworth, was their collective annus mirabilis: in a fantastically fertile-sounding workshop atmosphere, reading bits aloud to each other each evening, Charlotte (aged 29) wrote The Professor and Jane Eyre, Emily (aged 27) wrote Wuthering Heights and Anne (aged 25) wrote Agnes Grey. It’s a shame, to my mind, that the books were initially rejected by multiple publishers because this gave Emily time to revise her manuscript, adding the grindingly repetitive second half of the novel.But the Brontës were ambitious and kept pushing: eventually in 1847, three of the books appeared at the parsonage, bound in plum-coloured cloth with gold lettering along the spines. The reviews of Wuthering Heights were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly bad, although one critic praised its “savage grandeur” and Charlotte thought that in its “electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning”.Lutz has a nice, if slightly lush turn of phrase (Emily had to learn “to harness her devilish ferocity”) and is particularly good on weather, landscape and conjuring up sensory experiences. From newspaper records, she gives us a sense of the deadly snowstorms (“a mail-coach drove into a snowdrift, killing the coachman, guard and three horses”) and violent winds (“spray from the ocean over 70 miles away deposited a saline encrustation on windows”) that seeped into Emily’s imagination.As a biographer, however, Lutz has an occasional fondness for anachronistic scolding: Charlotte betrays “internalised misogyny” (well, it was 1840). She also shies away from addressing head on the central mystery of Emily’s life, which makes This Dark Night an informative but slightly stodgy read.With the exception of a year in a Brussels boarding school, which was hardly a den of iniquity, Emily lived a sheltered life at home, possibly without any romantic experiences at all. Where on earth did Wuthering Heights, which is not just any but the English novel of undying erotic obsession, come from? As Muriel Spark, whose short 1960 book on the subject is pungent and stylish (worth seeking out too is Winifred Gerin’s excellent 1971 biography), puts it: “Theories about Emily Brontë are, perhaps, only exceeded in number by theories about Shakespeare.”All that early trauma certainly had something to do with it, plus the unruly atmosphere of the moors and a rich diet in Byron’s poetry. Then there are the famously bizarre and intricate fantasy worlds that Emily and Anne continued to write and act out well into their twenties. Gondal sounds a bit Game of Thrones-y with its exotically named characters (Julius Brenzaida, Augusta G Almeda), battles, murders and extravagant lovesickness. Today, the shy teenage Brontës might have got very into internet fan fiction, but as it was, they had to build their own worlds from scratch, training from which Emily emerged with an extraordinarily muscular imagination.She died just before Christmas 1848, aged 30, possibly from tuberculosis, followed only five months later by heartbroken Anne. What else might Emily have written had she lived long enough for that wild imagination to mature? She was working on a second novel, which disappeared along with the rest of her papers, although in a pleasing flight of fancy Lutz imagines it could still exist somewhere, “stashed behind wall panels” or buried on the moors by its secretive, solitary writer.“You said I killed you — haunt me then!” Heathcliff rages, in desperate search of Cathy’s ghost. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë gave us one of the great ghost stories. Nice to think she’s out on those moors somewhere, dog by her side, pencil in hand. (Susie Goldsbrough)
50 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys1966This postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre takes up the story of the first Mrs Rochester. Swapping Charlotte Brontë’s cold, dark gothic for the oppressive sunshine of the Caribbean, Dominica-born Rhys reimagines Brontë’s notorious “madwoman in the attic” as a Creole heiress called Antoinette Cosway. After decades of obscurity, its critical success propelled Rhys back into the spotlight at the age of 76, with Angela Carter hailing the novel as “a complete reimagining of what literature can do”.First sentence“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”
20 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë1847Emerald Fennell’s maximalist, sexed-up film divided opinions on its release in February. The source text – Brontë’s only novel – was published under the pen name Ellis Bell, and was similarly polarising among its Victorian audience for its depiction of the destructive relationship of its antiheroes, Heathcliff and Cathy, and its moral ambivalence. Set on the blustery Yorkshire moors, it is considered a classic of gothic literature.First sentence“1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”
8 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë1847The tale of poor governess Jane, her unlikely love affair with Mr Rochester, and the madwoman in his attic was a bestseller on publication. (Her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights came out two months later.) Published under the pen name Currer Bell, its innovative first-person narrative, gothic and erotic themes thrilled contemporary readers.First sentence“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Eliot herself is a wise and gracious voice in the novel, breaking the fourth wall to remind us to look or think more carefully. For her, shifting point of view was not so much a literary technique as a moral obligation. Empathy is an overused word today, but for Eliot it was almost a religion. She had lost her faith, but showed that divinity can be found through true fellow feeling.This moral seriousness is sometimes mistaken for moralising, and Eliot as dull and preachy. Although admired, she is not held with the same affection as Austen or Dickens; her novels don’t lend themselves so readily to TV or film. They are not embedded in the public imagination like those of the Brontës. Neither Kate Bush nor Charli xcx felt moved to write pop songs about Middlemarch.
Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”. Virginia Woolf famously declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. OK, it is not as obviously passionate as Wuthering Heights (it is never going to have a soundtrack by Charli xcx), at No 20 on our list, or as fun as Pride and Prejudice (at nine). But all human life is here. (Lisa Allardice)
On the other hand, there is the failure of which “Wuthering Heights” is accused by audience members aplenty – a departure from the source material so pronounced that the overlap between the works would not suffice to draw a Venn diagram from.Harsh? I would say so. The focal point of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation is the tumultuous relationship between characters Catherine and Heathcliff, the very same placed at centre stage by many readers – and most film-length adaptations – since the book’s publication. Given the popularity of this romance as a focal point, I think that to base a criticism of Emerald Fennell’s film on her making the “emotional subtext [of the book] as explicit and viscous as possible” is to miss the nub of the actual problem. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is viscous, and it is explicit – and there is nothing wrong with that. The writing and direction embrace the emboldening title of a re-imagining from start to finish; the film’s costuming and set design are lavish, flirtatious with anachronisms, dream-like at times, and, when viewed altogether, very camp. From its very title, Fennell indicates that this is her intention, and from scouring the web for production interviews, I found next to nothing indicating otherwise. I would even suggest that viscosity and explicitness are two of Fennell’s strengths. [...]Why on earth is Fennell’s choice of material to treat derivatively so limited?Make no mistake. This is not a criticism of falling into the valley of redundancy – at least not in the sense usually applied to adaptations. It is a criticism of the limited scope of Fennell’s signature style of deviance. Fennell’s films bring into awe-inspiring and uncomfortably focal excess the latent sensuality of a setting that contains or is associated with repression. My main point of comparison here is Saltburn, which bounces between the innocent, sexless, honey-coloured spires of Oxford, and the cushioned walls of a wealthy family’s estate. All the while, jealous, obsessive, and often obscene idol-worship emerges slowly from its initial disguise of college romance. “Wuthering Heights”, for as much of it is brought on-screen, takes advantage of the modern audience’s advanced palate for sex to push the boundaries of public display to a new extreme. Voyeuristic masturbation, in real-time, is the audience’s first taste of Catherine and Heathcliff’s adult relationship. Once again, Fennell joins obsession with romance in a very telling way. That much is creditable – that is where the film is made, unmistakably, her own. But that is where the making stops.If my criticism were purely scope-based, I admit that it should apply just as much to other adaptations of the novel. Emily Brontë’s intricate expansion of the web in the second half of Wuthering Heights proper, creating a second generation of Earnshaws, Heathcliffs, Lintons, and everyone in between, is scarcely dealt with in popular culture, leaving stock images of the ill-fated, tragic soulmates Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff to occupy the cultural psyche. My edition of Wuthering Heights has 316 pages – in my notes, I write that “halfway thru (sic) the book at 167 and we’ve finished the movie”. This in itself, I want to emphasise, is not my criticism. I could not snub “Wuthering Heights” for being a mise en abyme if no previous adaptation has truly escaped said abyme either. Enclosing her title in scare quotes is about as explicit a disclaimer Fennell could have given – as openly acknowledged in her interview with Claire Valentine McCartney, the film is an attempt to “make sense” of just one “tiny piece” of the novel’s vastness. If she wants to make the most of a small part of the book for a contemporary audience, more power to her.What I shall criticise Fennell for is that her style of abyme-escapism would be so well-suited to the remainder of the text, and this neglect makes the entire film lacklustre in context. It is a sexy and stylish film, but from Fennell I would expect more than sex and style – I hoped, I think fairly, for innovation. A director whose signature is extracting and drawing out from her source the taboo topic of sex, and demonstrating with discomfitting proximity that we the audience are perhaps not as comfortable with the subject as we like to think, could have taken the opportunity presented by such a thematically rich text to bypass what Rahul Menon of ScriptMag dubs “[terror] of [her] own source material”. She could have put to the audience’s scrutiny – and tested our postmodern, non-censorial sensibilities – an equally frank handling of the topics of abuse, of familial incest in physical, mental, and figurative forms, of perversion of nature and its optionality and of sadism. New and demanding ground? Yes. But Fennell is a capable director, so why not make the demand? Instead, as Rahul notes, Fennell’s take skirts even the more contemporarily common social subjects of racism or classism, both included just as explicitly by Brontë as the less “popular” social subjects.What a fabulously subversive film we might have had – and, in terms of the qualities unique to an adaptation, what a great addition of value to the film canon – if Fennell had brought her proven capability and eye for subtlety to the tapestry of interwoven taboos that is the novel Heights. But, returning to the question of whether the quality of an adaptation affects its quality as a standalone film – although I should say, once and for all, that I think not – I am afraid that sex is the only live bird in Fennell’s film. Her nest is otherwise, to quote the novel, “full of little skeletons.” (T. Sehgal)
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Hasta el 12 de julio puedes recorrer las muestras “Literatura gótica” y “El mágico mundo de los libros de Harry Potter” en nuestra Fundación Cultural.El primer recorrido rinde tributo a la literatura gótica y a su extensa tradición a través de los siglos, desde grandes clásicos como Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein y Drácula, hasta su influencia contemporánea en la obra de autoras como Samanta Schweblin, Anne Rice o Agustina Bazterrica. Un viaje a través de conceptos claves de este género narrativo como el amor, el monstruo y la muerte.Para todos los fanáticos de Harry Potter tienen la oportunidad de disfrutar del mágico mundo de sus libros, rememorando pasajes icónicos del universo literario que partió con la publicación de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal en 1997.
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English author Emily Brontë is best known for her novel “Wuthering Heights,” a multigenerational story of obsession, revenge and love set in the Yorkshire moors. “This Dark Night,” the first full-length biography of Brontë in over 20 years and written by Penn State Professor of English Deborah Lutz, draws on Brontë’s formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts to bring new light to the author’s tragic and fiercely independent life.Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature, discussed in the following Q&A her new biography of Brontë and why readers still obsess over her novel nearly 200 years later.Q: Who was Emily Brontë?Lutz: Brontë grew up in a family of writers, and she collaborated with her siblings on all of her work. Both “Wuthering Heights” and her sister Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” grew out of this shared writing space. While she composed her great, gothic novel, with its gloomy passions, she did chores around the house — sewing her own clothing, making bread and cleaning the parlor. In “This Dark Night,” I evoke her as an embodied self; I ask, what was it like to be in a woman’s body in 1830s and 1840s West Yorkshire? What were the sounds, smells, the feelings along the skin?Q: Why continue to study her almost 200 years after her death?Lutz: New lovers of her novel “Wuthering Heights” appear every day, it seems! And so much new research over the past 30 years changes the way we see her. She knew queer people, like Anne Lister — called Gentleman Jack and recently was the subject of her own HBO series — a local lesbian. And the character Heathcliff was likely based on a person of color, possibly the child of an enslaved person passing through Liverpool — a major stop for ships involved in the slave trade. When he first arrives in the novel, after being found on the streets of Liverpool, he is speaking a foreign language and is described as “black,” a “gypsy” and with the appearance of an Indian sailor. Brontë also witnessed the beginnings of the climate crisis. Textile mills and mining in her area polluted the air and streams, and some of the birds she so loved were going extinct.Q: What new insights did you discover in your research? Any surprises?Lutz: I was surprised at how much she revised “Wuthering Heights,” since it’s easy to imagine it coming from her fully formed. But it went through distinct versions, and she really labored over it.But also how quickly she wrote it! She finished it in about two years. And then, after her death, Charlotte revised it again, when it was reprinted. Charlotte had always been ashamed of the novel, finding it coarse, violent and immature. She made it more conventional by stringing together short paragraphs and smoothing out the local speech. This seemed like a real betrayal of her sister, given that Emily had her own eccentric voice and Charlotte tried to tame it.Q: The new “Wuthering Heights” movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi recently hit streaming. Any thoughts about the film or why we keep returning to it two centuries later?Lutz: The new film is a visual feast and the costumes and interiors are amazing. It seemed a shame, though, that only about 5% of the dialogue comes from the novel. The novel is mainly oral — it's a tale full of people talking to one another — so it’s a missed opportunity to ignore most of Brontë’s text. It was also a shame to have Heathcliff played by a white actor. It’s fairly unusual for a great Victorian novel to have a major character who is a person of color, and I think today filmmakers should run with that. (Francisco Tutella)
Speaking to Sandgren first, he detailed the creative process behind the film’s visual language, the use of weather as an emotional tool, and the technical decision to shoot on VistaVision and Sandgren details the creative process behind the film’s visual language, the use of weather as an emotional tool, and the technical decision to shoot on VistaVision and 35mm film.When asked about Fennell’s approach to the film, Sandgren stated, “We were about to design a film from scratch from her sort of mind… everything—and you will talk maybe with Suzie about it—but how she built sets just from a fantasy version of how she basically saw it.”With the movie notably shot on film, that choice also had a key reason. Sandgren explained it, “Emerald really felt that the grain was needed for the emotional story… in my opinion, 16 millimeter is the most poetic emotional of all of those usually because… there’s some nostalgia or something that is helping you feel the texture of the skin.”Of course, with this film, Sandgren had to work with VistaVision cameras. For that format, as he stated, “What’s good with VistaVision for us was that we could have the same film stock and the same format and then just have a VistaVision camera. To me, like everything you—every decision you make should have a reason… usually in emotional stories I think it always helps with film so far… to create that sort of—that you’re actually watching an impression of reality and not reality.”Sandgren had plenty more to say about the production, including how the film’s visual style was built around “heightened realism,” using a stage-bound environment to create a “magical” and “surreal” atmosphere. Key emotional beats were emphasized through weather motifs. Production designer Susie Davies further expanded this. For Davies, the key was the process of building the film’s “heightened, surreal” world on a soundstage, her meticulous approach to designing the contrasting environments of the Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the close-knit collaboration between herself, the cinematographer, and the set decorator.Again, commenting on that “heightened realism,” Davies noted, “We were aiming for that sliver between reality and unreality. And when you’re on a soundstage, we aimed to make it feel real. We didn’t want anyone really to know, but ultimately… You end up with this weird sliver between reality and unreality.”Davies also recognized that this was something Fennell had wanted to do since her younger days. With that in mind, “This whole world building, you know, this teenage lens that we were going to show this story through, bringing to life her imagination was extraordinary.”As a great way to set things up for production designer Charlotte Dirickx, Davies talks about this continued collaboration. As she states, “She’s a real perfectionist, whereas I might cut corners for speed. She knows when to hold fast or, you know, her wealth of knowledge is like nothing else… yeah, she’s extraordinary and so talented with her eye.”For Dirckix, the experience did have its challenges. As she states, “The production involved highly unusual props and set details, spanning from real fish accented with lipstick set in resin jellies to massive fake strawberries crafted from cake. For the outdoor sets, the team referenced the stagey atmosphere of Florence Yoch’s gardens from Gone with the Wind and Fragonard’s painting The Swing, adding 12-foot weaves of dried gypsophila to construct a dreamlike background.This also spoke to the anachronistic take that was key to Fennell’s vision. “…We would take like a period shape, say for the furniture, but then upholster it in a kind of different or more modern fabric. So you’ve always got that slight jarring going on.”It’s this wide variety of choices that allows for the movie to stand out as much as it did in theaters. I was quite the fan and would have been happy spending so much more time with each of these three to dive even further into what the process of making so many exciting choices to realize this fully realized version of the world, originating with Emily Brontë and reimagined here by Fennell, was like. Given that all of these craftspeople worked on Saltburn as well, I’ll certainly be curious to see what they all tackle next. (Aaron Neuwirth)
I finally caught the latest film adaptation of Wuthering Heights last week and even though I knew it had been divisive I was still disappointed in a way I hadn’t imagined. I was prepared for the film to be tacky and over the top and too much, and that didn’t faze me at all. I welcomed it. The source material demands it, in fact. But I cannot forgive the fact that in the 2026 version of Wuthering Heights there is absolutely no haunting.What is Wuthering Heights without ghosts? It becomes a mildly sordid tale of the romance between two very beautiful people that ends when one of them dies, and it also makes Kate Bush’s song of the same name make no sense at all. A non-Gothic Wuthering Heights is a particularly odd choice because I’d assumed the auteur Emerald Fennell would have jumped at the chance to explore Heathcliff’s despair for dead Cathy throughout his troubled life and use his pain as an opportunity to get really weird. I still can’t believe Saltburn is still the only Emerald Fennell film with a very dirty graveside wanking scene.Ending Wuthering Heights at Cathy’s death is like ending The Great Gatsby after the big party, or ending The Secret History at the bacchanal. There is so much more that happens afterward—and it’s the uglier, messier parts that make great fiction great. As it stands the latest movie version is simply too pretty, with all of its rougher edges flattened out. I suppose I should have expected this, given that the role of Catherine is played by Barbie herself (Margot Robbie), after all.Fennell’s film is just one example of a phenomenon adjacent to whitewashing in film that I’ll call hot-washing. There’s nothing new about Hollywood adaptations featuring profoundly good-looking people, but film stars used to be made to look a bit more… regular, particularly before plastic surgery made the faces of so many A-list actresses look eerily similar.Hot-washing is when source material that’s complicated has its edges smoothed out by the casting of conventionally hot people who are made to look conventionally hot in a way that clashes with the source material, and it’s ruining a bunch of recent literary adaptations whose characters are meant to seem a little more real. Imagine if Bridget Jones’s Diary were remade in 2026 with Sydney Sweeney as the title character. (Maris Kreizman)
A contributor to Los Angeles Times writes about her 'bucket-list trip to Yorkshire'.This film is everything the book is not. It doesn’t adapt the novel so much as it uses it almost loosely as a starting point, and then turns the entire material upside down. Emily Brontë never imagined that her Cathy would be played by a Barbie-era actress, with a Charli XCX score blaring in the background, accompanied by an Australian Heathcliff and a boudoir-esque Isabella. In fact, there is reason to speculate that she would not be fond of any of these twists of events. Naturally, fans of her work aren’t either.The biggest disconnect comes from how the film markets itself: “the greatest love story ever told”. Yet, that’s never what the original story was. “Wuthering Heights” is not a romance in the traditional sense. It’s a cautionary tale about obsessive love, cycles of abuse, domination, vengeance, and the way toxicity echoes across generations. It’s about how that kind of love doesn’t just destroy the people involved, but everyone around them as well. The only sense of peace comes when those patterns are finally partially broken.Catherine and Heathcliff are often mistaken for the ultimate romantic ideal, but their connection is rooted in possession, mutual destruction, and something almost brutally confusing. It’s about the faint possibility of redemption through the next generation. The novel focuses on class difference, racism and discrimination, and deteriorating mental health. It never romanticises the eventual psychosis.However, the movie barely explores these dynamics. Instead, it leans heavily into the intensity that comes with yearning. And yes, there is a lot of it, particularly crafted for the female gaze.I would actually argue that there is too much of it. The cast is perfectly capable of adapting their lines, but on screen, their chemistry is reduced to just playing dialogue. It pushes a narrative of forbidden love that is absent because of the plot lines that the movie doesn’t adapt.There is an interesting, unexpected positive note, though, which is the visuals. The direction is unapologetically bold. Emerald Fennell rejects the muted minimalism that a lot of modern films lean into and instead embraces a loud, saturated, and almost overwhelming aesthetic. The use of colour is striking: Cathy’s skin against her crimson outfits that represent her inner turmoil, the deliberate clashing tones, and the heightened tone of the palette that turns every frame into something picturesque.There isn’t a single scene or outfit that wasn’t carefully placed or thought out. The film uses vast, evocative backdrops to conjure a kind of sentimentality that feels aptly grand. A few instances that come to mind are the colder scenery changes during the lowest pivots, as well as Cathy’s room, which resembles the veins beneath our skin. The latter, in particular, perfectly articulates her eventual descent. Even the stylistic choices, like the almost anachronistic elements and the unexpected costume influences, add to the film’s identity, allowing it to go beyond the boundaries of traditional period drama.At times, it feels like the film is more interested in being seen than being understood and strangely, that’s where it succeeds the most. Even when the narrative falters, the imagery carries it. You could honestly watch this film purely for its cinematography and walk away satisfied.“Wuthering Heights”— intentionally titled with quotation marks—exists here as more of an idea than an adaptation. A reinterpretation, a reimagining that prioritises emotion, aesthetics, and atmosphere over fidelity. Emerald Fennel said her goal was to capture the experience of a teenage girl reading a romance book for the first time. She clarified several times that she has no intention of adapting the book but rather depicting her own interpretation of it. Watching the movie with that in mind might leave less shock and bitterness, and could even satisfy a cinephile who prefers the visuals. (Tinath Zaeba)
Brontë CountryIt is difficult to imagine a fictional tale more gothic, inspirational and remarkable than that of three brilliant sisters who lived in relative isolation on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, secretly battling their socially conscripted futures by writing poems and novels that they dared not publish under their own names.Two of those novels — ”Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë and “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, are still considered masterworks, influencing subsequent generations and endlessly adapted for film and television. (In the ultimate Yorkshire crossover, Wainwright wrote the breathtaking two-part Brontë biopic “To Walk Invisible,” which everyone should see.)The Brontë Parsonage Museum, and the town of Haworth which it overlooks, is very much a tourist attraction. An information annex, gift shop and public restroom have been added behind it, but once you enter the small garden that stands between the parsonage’s front door and St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, you are in another world.In 1820, Patrick Brontë, recently appointed incumbent of St. Michael, moved his wife, Maria, and their six children into the parsonage where they all lived for the rest of their natural (albeit in most cases, short) lives. Maria died in 1821; the two older children, Maria and Elizabeth, died four years later after being sent to a typhoid-plagued school Charlotte would pillory as Lowood in “Jane Eyre.”The museum is meticulously restored to reflect the years that the surviving children — Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, the only son — were young adults. The dining room table, where the sisters wrote, is strewn with manuscripts, quill pens and tea cups; a bonnet and shawl bedeck a chair in the small kitchen. Patrick had his own study but it is difficult to imagine three women being able to write separate works, never mind classics, in such close quarters. Ironically, only Branwell’s room, papered with sketches and poems, looks like an artist’s refuge.Unlike his three sisters, Branwell, his artistic career stunted by alcoholism and an opium addiction, never published. He died of tuberculosis in 1848 at 31.If any place should be haunted, it is the Brontë parsonage. Shortly after Branwell’s funeral (and just a year after “Wuthering Heights” was published), 30-year-old Emily also died of tuberculosis, expiring on the sofa that stands beside the dining room table. A few months later, after the publication of her second novel, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Anne, 29, succumbed to the disease in nearby Scarborough, just south of Whitby.Charlotte, who wrote two more novels after “Jane Eyre,” was the only sister to be celebrated during her lifetime. She married and then died at the parsonage in 1855 at 38 of complications from her first pregnancy. Only Patrick lived to old age — 84 — dying in 1861 in the home where he had served for 41 years.But it is not a sad house; instead visitors are left to wonder at the genius, resolution and audacity that roiled the quiet rooms and halls where the sisters secretly wrote and sent out their manuscripts, all initially under the the names of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell.The steeply descending main street of Haworth is filled with tea shops, pubs and stores clearly dedicated to pleasing Brontë pilgrims, but its basic form, including the original stationery store where the sisters once bought their paper, remains the same.As do the moors that stretch behind the parsonage. On a walk to the Brontë Waterfall (more like a small but still lovely rill) and Top Withens, the ruin of a 16th century farmhouse believed to have inspired “Wuthering Heights,” the wild silence and sweeping vistas are even more transporting than the parsonage. One imagines not the ghost of Cathy or Heathcliff, but a trio of women, very much alive and striding through the heather, their minds alight with the stories they would tell, set among similar terrain. (Mary McNamara)
